Vehicle Routing with Drones

TL;DR

This paper presents a heuristic algorithm for optimizing combined truck and drone delivery schedules, demonstrating significant efficiency gains and potential cost savings over traditional truck-only systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel heuristic approach for scheduling drone and truck deliveries, improving upon simple greedy methods and highlighting the benefits of drone integration.

Findings

Our algorithm outperforms greedy algorithms in scheduling efficiency.

Using drones significantly reduces delivery costs.

Empirical results show substantial savings with drone-assisted delivery.

Abstract

We introduce a package service model where trucks as well as drones can deliver packages. Drones can travel on trucks or fly; but while flying, drones can only carry one package at a time and have to return to a truck to charge after each delivery. We present a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem of finding a good schedule for all drones and trucks. The algorithm is based on two nested local searches, thus the definition of suitable neighbourhoods of solutions is crucial for the algorithm. Empirical tests show that our algorithm performs significantly better than a natural Greedy algorithm. Moreover, the savings compared to solutions without drones turn out to be substantial, suggesting that delivery systems might considerably benefit from using drones in addition to trucks.